Disclaimer – What I’m discussing here isn’t unit testing (hence the quotes), it’s more functional or integration testing; but as the term “Unit Testing” is often “abused” to mean “anything that uses a (unit) testing framework” so I’ve included it in the title to avoid confusion.

Introduction

I’m currently using TinyIoC in my first forays into MonoTouch development, and my initialisation code was throwing a resolution error on starup:

The Exception that was given was that IStateManager could not be resolved, which was odd given that the StateManager was registered against IStateManager, and everything in its constructor was also registered:

To The Debugger.. Right?!

So at this point your immediate reaction may be to fire up the debugger, trace into the code and start hacking around, debugging and hacking around some more until it works. Sure, that’s an approach, and one I’m sure we’ve all used in the past; but as I was pretty sure the issue was in TinyIoC itself I took a slightly different tack.

To The Test Runner!

With the approach above I would have to build and run my app every time I wanted to check if my “fix” had actually worked – and even if it had, how would I know it hadn’t broken something else? The solution is quite simple – recreate the conditions of the bug in a unit test, using stubs/mocks to replace your real classes, and make sure it fails in the same way:

I’ve added an Assert to show what behaviour I think it *should* have. It’s a pretty horrible looking test, but it accurately represents what my failing code was doing, and the test fails as I expected it to. Now I can attach the debugger and find out what’s going on, safe in the knowledge I have a fast executing test available to verify my fix, and the rest of my test suite there to ensure I haven’t broken anything else.

After a very brief investigation it turned out that there was a bug in registration when *just* an Interface type was registered with an concrete instance (the IViewManager registration above). The “InstanceFactory” it was using hadn’t set the “AssumeResolves” flag, so TinyIoC was actually trying to find a valid constructor for IViewManager – which obviously wasn’t going to succeed. It’s a scenario I probably should have factored into my Unit Tests, but hey, nobody is perfect 🙂

Conclusion

This post is aimed at covering two points:

Test aren’t just for TDD. If you find a bug, isolate it with a test and you have a quick and easy way to verify a fix, and verify you haven’t broken anything else.

Code Coverage isn’t everything. Apart from a few “defensive coding” null checks, the core of TinyIoC has pretty much 100% code coverage with its tests, but it didn’t help me with this issue. Although the code path was covered, the exact input (Interface type, concrete instance) wasn’t in my unit tests, so don’t assume 100% code coverage means 0 bugs in the code, there may well be a scenario you missed!

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About GrumpyDev

Hello there! My name is Steven Robbins, and this is my allegedly technical blog. These days I generally work in C# and SQL, but in the past I’ve developed in everything from Assembly Language (68000 and x86) through to VB.Net/C#, with plenty of others inbetween. I’ve also done my time in the support/engineering side of IT, so I’m pretty much a geek through and through 🙂 I’m a firm believer that reading and “best practices” are no substitute for using your brain! more..